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<title>wmpipe: an Introduction</title>
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<!-- Overview -->
<h3>Introduction to wmpipe</h3>
<p>The basic idea behind wmpipe is to create a library of shell functions
that enable the quick creation of dynamic (pipe) menus for certain X
Window Managers.</p>

<p>The basic requirements were a logical and consistent code layout,
efficient code execution (so as to offset the shell overhead), portability
to different distros/os's and the ability to customize and integrate the
menus easily into a user's desktop.</p>

<p>The distribution contains several sample scripts of varying utility
that cover some of the most common usages for pipe menus. Of interest and
to display the modular nature of the code, the scripts are implemented
as multi-call executables (like busybox). In other words, one script can
be used to generate a menu for icewm, pekwm, and openbox with an identical
or nearly identical set of features and layout in each WM. This is
accomplished by reading the name the script was executed as to set an
environment variable and so tell the script which set of functions to
load.</p>

<p>Also of interest is that the scripts are re-locatable, with the
provisos that the main config files are in /etc/wmpipe and the relative
locations of the scripts and function libraries are maintained. In other
words, you can move the scripts from /foo/bin to /bar/bin just so long
as you also move the shell function files in /foo/lib/wmpipe to
/bar/lib/wmpipe.</p>

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      <h3 class="links">Contents</h3>
		<a href="introduction.html" title="wmpipe: an Introduction">
		Introduction</a><br>
		<a href="installation.html" title="wmpipe: Installation">
		Installation</a><br>
		<a href="usage.html" title="wmpipe: Usage">
		Usage</a><br>
		<a href="scripts.html" title="wmpipe: Scripts">
		Scripts</a><br>
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